Google is going to screw your ad agency.

Or, better said, they are going to mess with your organic listing. Which means, that your ad agency will be harder to find. And, therefore screwed.

Many of the ad, digital, etc. agencies I talk with tell me that their SEO is not delivering the power that it once did. Between ads taking top positions, Google’s desire to answer your inquiry right on page one in a snippet (like Google’s answering what the tallest tree is in a two-sentence snippet so you do not even have to go to the expert tree website).

Google is changing, again.

I urge you to go to Neil Patel’s How Google’s New Layout Predicts the Future of SEO to read an in-depth review of what Google is doing/considering. Believe me, this is not good news for you or me since I get the majority of my leads from a Google search.

From Neil: The big trend is that the organic search results have been drastically pushed down below the fold. Roughly by 3.3X.

How does that look? Pretty bad folks. One example… who is ever going to see that blog that you spend hours crafting?

What To Do?

First of all, the benefits of a Google search will not go away. Sure your ad agency might be on page two or three but I am going to imagine that people will scroll down a bit more to see the organic lists. OK, maybe. What can your ad agency do?

Buy Google ads.

Make sure your snippets work hard. Focus on the user and give them a reason to click through. Be, yes, even more creative and informative. Think direct marketing. How will you get people to act the way you want them to?

Pay a lot of attention to what Google’s algorithms are looking for. Beyond keywords, think about page speed, time on your website, etc.

Go omnichannel. Be everywhere that a potential client might go to find you. Think like a client that is looking for a marketing communications agency.

Make more videos and market them to get a higher position on Google and YouTube.

Make sure that you have that kick ass sales-oriented website. Have some soul and attitude and deliver the message that a client needs to hear. Pay attention to not sounding like the agency down the road.

Be efficient. Use the Rule Of Five to amplify your thinking. A white paper is paper you can send out, a blog post, a Tweet, a LinkedIn post, a Slideshare presentation, an informative email and on…

Go direct. Use Account Based Marketing to directly market to your best prospects.

As an agency owner once said to me when I asked him what business development strategies work… “We do everything because we never know what works.”

Pay Attention.

Your clients hire you because you understand the pace of change and what works and doesn’t. Do that for yourself. Asleep at your own marketing wheel is not a safe trip.

Consider a quarterly review of your ad agency marketing.

Next.

Read my blog. There are over 650 blog posts about how to grow your ad agency awareness and how to get in front of the right clients to drive leads. Here’s the master list.

One Comment

There also needs to be more focus on long-tail search and designing content and/or landing pages that support it. No one will find you by searching for “Ad Agency,” or even “Ad Agency Hollywood,” but you could be number for “Hollywood hamster social media.” Geo targeting is important, too. Even if your target is national, you could be missing out on the low-hanging fruit right in your backyard. But… I could be wrong.